Bad Climate News Out of Geophysical Sciences Conference

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Bad Climate News Out of Geophysical Sciences Conference

With thousands of scientists who study the earth gathered here in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting, news is flying about climate change, and it's bad. Here's a couple examples from among hundreds of presentations of what's being discussed.

One, ice melt in Greenland is accelerating beyond scientists' expectations, says Konrad Steffen, a UC-Boulder scientist. That acceleration means that the IPCC probably underestimated the impacts of Greenland ice melt on global sea level rises. New understanding of glacial activity could mean that sea level rise estimates will double or triple over the next five years. Two, University of Illinois atmospheric scientists have revised their models to better incorporate nitrogen availability, which impacts plants abilities to serve as "carbon sinks" that remove CO2 from the air. Crops treated with fertilizer should be OK, but forests' ability to take in carbon dioxide could be limited.

These announcements underscore that despite general agreement among scientists on the general outline for climate change, they are still working out some of the details. Unfortunately, it seems that the more we know, the more dire the reality of climate change.

On the fun side of climate change, a host of talks on geoengineering, or the large-scale hacking of the Earth to mitigate the effects warming effect of increased atmospheric CO2, will take place on Friday morning. We'll bring you scintillating, live coverage of panels like: